There's No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It's a Good Thing, Too

By Stanley Fish

Book Overview

In an era when much of what passes for debate is merely moral posturing--traditional family values versus the cultural elite, free speech versus censorship--or reflexive name-calling--the terms "liberal" and "politically correct," are used with as much dismissive scorn by the right as "reactionary" and "fascist" are by the left--Stanley Fish would seem an unlikely lightning rod for controversy. A renowned scholar of Milton, head of the English Department of Duke University, Fish has emerged as a brilliantly original critic of the culture at large, praised and pilloried as a vigorous debunker of the pieties of both the left and right. His mission is not to win the cultural wars that preoccupy the nation's attention, but rather to redefine the terms of battle.
In There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, Fish takes aim at the ideological gridlock paralyzing academic and political exchange in the nineties. In his witty, accessible dissections of the swirling controversies over multiculturalism, affirmative action, canon revision, hate speech, and legal reform, he neatly eviscerates both the conservatives' claim to possession of timeless, transcendent values (the timeless transcendence of which they themselves have conveniently identified), and the intellectual left's icons of equality, tolerance, and non-discrimination. He argues that while conservative ideologues and liberal stalwarts might disagree vehemently on what is essential to a culture, or to a curriculum, both mistakenly believe that what is essential can be identified apart from the accidental circumstances (of time and history) to which the essential is ritually opposed.
In the book's first section, which includes the five essays written for Fish's celebrated debates with Dinesh D'Souza (the author and former Reagan White House policy analyst), Fish turns his attention to the neoconservative backlash. In his introduction, Fish writes, "Terms that come to us wearing the label 'apolitical'--'common values', 'fairness', 'merit', 'color blind', 'free speech', 'reason'--are in fact the ideologically charged constructions of a decidedly political agenda. I make the point not in order to level an accusation, but to remove the sting of accusation from the world 'politics' and redefine it as a synonym for what everyone inevitably does." Fish maintains that the debate over political correctness is an artificial one, because it is simply not possible for any party or individual to occupy a position above or beyond politics. Regarding the controversy over the revision of the college curriculum, Fish argues that the point is not to try to insist that inclusion of ethnic and gender studies is not a political decision, but "to point out that any alternative curriculum--say a diet of exclusively Western or European texts--would be no less politically invested."
In Part Two, Fish follows the implications of his arguments to a surprising rejection of the optimistic claims of the intellectual left that awareness of the historical roots of our beliefs and biases can allow us, as individuals or as a society, to escape or transcend them. Specifically, he turns to the movement for reform of legal studies, and insists that a dream of a legal culture in which no one's values are slighted or declared peripheral can no more be realized than the dream of a concept of fairness that answers to everyone's notions of equality and jsutice, or a yardstick of merit that is true to everyone's notions of worth and substance. Similarly, he argues that attempts to politicize the study of literature are ultimately misguided, because recharacterizations of literary works have absolutely no impact on the mainstream of political life. He concludes his critique of the academy with "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos," an extraordinary look at some of the more puzzing, if not out-and-out masochistic, characteristics of a life in academia.
Penetrating, fearless, and brilliantly argued, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech captures the essential Fish. It is must reading for anyone who cares about the outcome of America's cultural wars.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195080181
• ISBN13: 9780195080186
• Release Date: November 1993
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Stanley Fish is after you! Yes you!

Now, sitting comfortably? Are you a liberal or a conservative? Do you think your views, sane, rational, fair, unbiased or generally decent? Well what if I told you that you are a biased, interested, often irrational and double-dealing individual who rigs debates, fixes the meanings of discourses (and things) and generally configures things to your own advantage and your opponent's disadvantage? OK, you would disagree with me: BUT THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT STANLEY FISH IS SAYING ABOUT YOU!! He does this in a series of extraordinary essays attacking conservatives and liberals alike (though under the post-Enlightenment rubric of "liberalism" in general, that belief system shared by most modern, Western thinkers) for their slipperiness in debate and their use of fake and polemical principles, actually the products of politics (a noble because unavoidable category for Fish). Fish's aim in all this seems to be to drag everyone back to their contextual and historical time and place(s) and to do away with the notion that we can avoid this or retreat into our various cognitive, abstract and universalising hiding places. What is left is what we had before Fish started writing and what, according to Fish, we will always have: political debate, the opportunity to convince your peers that this way is better than that, that this conclusion is better than that one. But, after Fish, we won't be able to do this by appealing to principles anymore since he has exposed them all as partisan and political. So "hoorah" for Stanley Fish's eye opening book, let's build a better world, and watch out, Stanley Fish is after you!PoSTmodERnFoOL

A layman's viewpoint of an excellent book

This series of essays is extremely thought-provoking and intellectually rigorous. I have returned to this book numerous times either for an essay or the entire collection. It makes me wish I could have been there for his debates with D'souza. Fish's thoughts on affirmative action, free speech, etc... are very timely and really make you ponder some of the deeper issues that face us literally every day because of legislation, simple discussion or introspection. I always love reading someone who takes you far away culture either as an american or a human being and reminds us that things do not always have to be as they are. He can make you look at you the world in a new way (as Edward Hall does for cultural anthropology). The essay format makes it very readable. I wanted to put in a word for those who may be browsing but are not part of the academic elite, don't know who Mencken, is and aren't into Milton critiques.

Mercilessly clear and to the point. A relentless critique of immense rhetorical power.

Stanley Fish is not content to be one of the greatest Milton scholars of our time--he also has to write brilliantly about the state of the academy and the nation. Clearly he has learned his rhetoric lessons from Milton. Fish is a rare creature, an extremely sharp intellect able to convey points without taking an anti-intellectual turn or resorting to the rather exclusive vocabularly common to so many of his colleagues. This particular outing finds the good professor Fish critiquing Free Speech as it is often resorted to in contemporary politics, taking issue with both right and left. But make no mistake: Fish has his politics, and the reader can chase them through some 307 pages of engagements with Supreme Court decisions, New Historicist literary scholars, the Critical Legal Studies movement, and plenty of neoconservatives. The only that's dry here is Fish's ample wit. The result is stunning: a critique of the Left from the Left which goes beyond the now-tired critique of political correctness to ask some very astute questions about how America will face its dark self in its past, present, and future. Flinch we might, but Fish won't let us simply turn our back and run in whichever direction we should choose